If you happen to be in Beijing, pass by the Planetarium to see the “Silk Road at Night” photo exhibition. It’s a great effort put up by fellow TWANer Dai Jianfeng from China. 37 photographers, 38 countries, 56 photos from all over the world, but only “One People, One Sky.” I have one photo in the exhibition. It’s a shot of the Venus transit in 2012. I took the photo from the shore of the Black Sea through a 1m focal length telescope. A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet, becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun. Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. The last transit of Venus was on 5 and 6 June 2012, and was the last Venus transit of the 21st century; the prior transit took place on 8 June 2004. I managed to see and photograph that one too. The next transits of Venus will be on 10–11 December 2117, and […]